On Sept. 5, 2005, seven days after Hurricane Katrina ravaged his family home in New Orleans, Michael Seidman, a student at the University of New Orleans, found himself boarding a bus outside Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix.

He was alone in a new city, a backpack holding the small catalogue of his worldly belongings -- a few pairs of socks, a pair of shorts, two T-shirts and the names of his fantasy football teams scrawled on a scrap of paper -- strapped to his back. His destination: ASU. His mission: to find some sense of normalcy in a world one act of nature had turned upside down.